I was recently looking at the W3C. They are having an event in Lyon, France, right before things kick off in Prague. It’s called TPAC – aka “Technical Plenary, and Advisory Committee Meeting”. I’ll quote from their FAQ https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2018/FAQ:

TPAC is the acronym for our annual “All Working Group meetings, Technical Plenary, and Advisory Committee Meeting week”. TPAC has three components:

Meetings of as many W3C Working Groups who choose to meet during this week;

A “plenary day”;

A meeting of the W3C Advisory Committee.

So, not too dissimilar from what we see EthMagicians Councils evolving into over time.

They are also making a call to Working Groups to flesh out their breakout sessions. Breakout sessions are the sessions which are not “plenaries” – that is, not all Council sessions.

I love the rigor and format for how to create a breakout session and description of them. However, this still seems more un-conference format as the decision for what topic to discuss for the day doesn’t happen until the “mad scramble” in the morning, leaving little time for anyone to adequately prepare/do homework for a given topic.

It would be nice to get to a cadence (this will not happen soon FYI) of using some of the larger in person events for topics/breakouts that people can prepare for in advance so that the discussions are richer and more useful for actual progress post session.

As you suggested @boris I think our call for rings is a great first step to identify overall themes for our breakouts and we can do a bit of messaging now that we have many of the rings formalized to ask ring leaders to prep a skeleton for what to accomplish during the session in Prague.

Maybe this is a topic for the meta ring, but hopefully we can build on the the W3C wiki for how we want to make a call for topics for future in person meetings and for satellite sessions globally?

Having been to every TPAC (and helped plan the idea back around the turn of the century,) I might be able to give more insight.

There are in fact some slots planned in the breakout, but most of it is held for the “mad rush”. That’s because in the 9 months leading up to the event, the other 4 days of the week are planned as Working Group meetings, including figuring out which groups want to talk to which other ones when, how to make sure as few people as possible are stuck trying to be in two places at once, and getting an agenda late enough that you don’t assign two hours to do what it turns out you finished two weeks before the event, but early enough that people can actually plan for an international 500+ person event with about 30 working groups meeting for a day or more plus at least as many short breakouts.